Ah, skeuomorphism - my favourite punching bag. Austin Carr has spoken to former Apple designers and people within the company, and they're all confirming there's a rift within Cupertino between people who want to move away from skeuomorphism, and people who want to retain it as much as possible, and even want to expand it. Since I've long hoped for Apple to ditch this "visual masturbation", as one former Apple designer calls it, I'm happy to learn not the entire company supports skeuomorphism.

I think this whole Skeumorphist thing might have been the reason the App Store got so big so fast. Apple gave devs and designers free-reign with regards to looks (possibly to compensate for other restrictions they placed, I dunno), and this is what you got.

Not that I support the idea or anything. I hate all this inconsistency. So much so that, now that I use Android, I've limited myself to using Holo themed apps exclusively as much as possible (games and some Autodesk software being the only exception).

Forget about apps. Just do a comparo between Google Now and Siri. Disregard the voice detection and accuracy of results for a moment, and just concentrate on the way each pulls up their results. Google Now gets the consistency points with results either via cards or Google's search. On iOS, it's all over the place. Yahoo weather widgets, Google search results, Wolfram Alpha paper for calculations, some hideous clock widget with rounded edges for time, sports results in sharp-edged cards, etc. For a company that claims to be design-oriented, this lack of consistency is downright abysmal.

Whatever this rift is about, I sure hope the side that wins brings a far more consistent UI experience. I'm not asking for terminals everywhere (though that would be awesome in its own way), but at least make them stop being so damn tacky.